The Alt-Right Playbook: Always a Bigger Fish

Innuendo Studios · 2.6M views · 2019 · 21:46

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Why Hacker News recommends it

Cited as a thoughtful video essay and for its model of in-group hierarchy in political threads.

What it is

Innuendo Studios' Alt-Right Playbook episode, drawing on Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, argues that conservatism defends hierarchy and a shrinking in-group.

Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2025.

What Hacker News said

Strong rec gaze · 2022-06 · on “Microsoft Purview: Additional classifiers for Communication Compliance (preview)”

Yeah it's not necessarily true. I think Innuendo Studios/Ian Danskin explains this mechanism very very well [this video] Many people think Jeff Bezos should exist and have his wealth because he got there by playing the game better than everyone else, and that this game is just the way things are. He earned it. Attempts to change the game will just make everything worse and people won't get what they deserve, and thus these attempts are unethical. Equal societies are an absurd liberal fantasy. My attempts to advocate that Jeff Bezos shouldn't have the money he does are actually just selfish attempts to cheat at the game and stuff my own pockets with money and get something I haven't earned. The re

Recommends pxc · 2019-04 · on “The golden age of YouTube is over”

My favorite corner of YouTube— lengthy, thoughtful, and often artistic video essays and skits addressing culture and politics— is flourishing right now. Some examples: Unfolding Ideas – [LINK] ContraPoints – [LINK] Philosophy Tube – [LINK] Lindsay Ellis – [LINK] Innuendo Studios – [this video] HBomberguy – [LINK] and so on. And it seems like it's only in the past couple of years that many of these channels have reached their current levels of artistry and production value. Most stuff on YouTube is trash, but there's plenty else to watch.

Recommends Terr_ · 2025-09 · on “Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction”

> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity. I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics. There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay: > See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...] > Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of

Cites random314 · 2021-04 · on “Amazon 2020 Letter to Shareholders”

Standard conservative thinking. Society is meant to be hierarchical, bottom feeders are supposed to serve the small percentile of elites. This is the natural order of things. Social support systems for the bottom feeders makes the bottom feeders entitled. Democratic government focus inevitably moves towards social programs which must be pushed back hard by the elite. Most elites inherit their elite status. We must ignore this and talk about anecdotes of how some software engineer made a lot of money in Silicon valley. Buying bitcoin and TSLA a few years ago is also an undeniable marker of extraordinarily elite thinking, which society must reward. We must never bluntly state our beliefs but c

Cites phatskat · 2024-11 · on “Maybe Bluesky has "won"”

This is what we see in fascism and authoritarianism - the goal is to always make the circle smaller. You start with immutable traits (race, gender, hair color, etc) to chunk out a large part of the population, but once they’re gone, that small circle needs to get smaller. There’s Always a Bigger Fish[1] [1] [this video]

Cites slimscsi · 2025-03 · on “The Road Not Taken Is Guaranteed Minimum Income”

This mentality is exactly the problem. The idea that people with more money should get to decide how people with less money get to spend it. And if they don't sped it the way they want, Its waste. reminds me a lot of Innuendo Studios "Always a bigger fish" video [this video]

Cites phatskat · 2025-04 · on “Federal Government's letter to Harvard demanding changes [pdf]”

> I guess it's not fascism if its against people you disagree with. What’s fun about fascism ™ is that the circle of people being agreed with gets smaller as power is concentrated more towards a central figure. What’s his face, the Jewish white supremacist? Surely somewhere deep in the back of his mind is the warning bell that will start going off if we reach a certain stage of fascism. The “out group” starts with the most marginalized and vulnerable and moves inward. [There’s Always a Bigger Fish]( [this video] )